Report of bookmarking, Pintrest, Mind Mapping and Polls

  Just as the author said, these media tools such as bookmarking, pintrest, mind mapping, and polls “are smaller, but no less effective, social media that have as their educational focus the skill of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.” (P. 224)

  I really appreciate the way you give this Web 2.0 class to us, I think it’s a typical manipulation of bookmarking. On each Tuesday and Thursday morning, we need to look though the relative websites around the same topic you provided, select which we want to talk about and qualify our choices by giving evidence and evaluate our websites and comment on others’ websites. At first, I didn’t know I needed to make a note to record the key point and what I was interested in the website, so I couldn’t organize the verbal presentation later logically. But it was better after I took notes when I looked through the website.

  You always give us some suggestions and guidance before we started our missions to make us be clear about the keynote of websites, it did help us doing better in making summary and evaluate the websites latter. As you know, I don’t like lecture-class because it ignores the essential communication in education. I like to talk with you in class when you have some ideas about my websites so I can obtain more knowledge about relative topics and some new ideas would be inspired in this process. And in China, I usually use bookmarking for news or video sharing in instant messaging tools like WeChat or microblogs by tagging it with appropriate keywords as the recommendation because I want to share the interesting and meaningful things I have discovered to my friends to get a validation of them.

  And mind mapping is also an effective way for students to promote their skills of analysis, synthesis and evaluation, and it’s benefit for problem driving learning. Starting a mind map to deal with a specific problem, students need analyze the problem first, add problem and possible ideas about solution on onscreen diagram, drag and drop ‘bubbles’ as background of ideas and ‘branches’ as relationships between different ideas, then they need to link them together to help them synthesize and visualize their ideas and relationships. So mind mapping can help students construct their thinking structure and promote their problem-solving capabilities, it’s benefit for motivating their creativities when they list all the possible ideas about solving a problem when they use mind map.

  When we are not sure about making choice on somethings we have no idea about, we always want to know other people’s choice about the same thing for suggestion. So initiating a poll between different choices about a question and invite other people to make their choices on that is the best way. We can gather the results of poll and collect suggestions and information given by others for analyzing, figure out others’ bias indicated to the same question to help us make our own choice. And poll also plays an important role on doing research in social and cultural studies such as psychology, relative researchers can get attitudes toward to the same question between different people by analyzing the statistics of poll. For teachers, they can use poll to figure out the status of students clearly and design appropriate class for students according to the results.